Watkins’s fourth book. Rose of Sharon — named for the Grapes of Wrath character — is a Sierra Club fundraiser living in a cinder block cabin in the Mojave, her daughter with an ex on the East Coast for the school year. She’s fallen in with the misfits at Yellow Pine, Nevada, who are fighting a planned industrial solar farm and what Rose sees as a green energy gold rush eating the desert. Then Miles, a charismatic old flame, calls out of nowhere. What she wants from him and from her forties is another child, and the book becomes a bawdy, furious, midlife accounting of how to live decently in a landscape being consumed.
Yellow Pine